Transit

Choo-choo obsessives

by Laura A. Siegel

Presidents' Conference Committee streetcars came onto the American scene in the late 1930s. The Boston area had an extensive network of the sleek Art Deco cars. "You could go to West Roxbury, you could go to Chelsea, you could go to Arlington by streetcar," says Charles Bahne, vice-president of the Boston Street Railway Association. "You could go to Dorchester, you could go down into Quincy."

Designed to compete with the automobile, the PCC cars couldn't save the streetcar system. As trains gave way to cars, "those lines all closed in the '40s and '50s," says Bahne, who grew up in a suburb of Indianapolis and couldn't get anywhere without a car. Then, when he arrived at MIT, he had a revelation: "For 20 cents, at the time, you could go anywhere you want!" An obsession was born.

Most of the PCCs in Boston were taken out of service in the mid '80s. Today there are just six left of the once-mighty fleet, shuttling back and forth on the Mattapan-Ashmont line. Yet though they're all but gone, they're not forgotten. The members of the Boston Street Railway Association will remember the PCCs and their history in a slide show this weekend, as part of the group's mission -- which, according to its Web site (http://members.aol.com/bsra5706/), is "to inform the public of past and current trends in mass transit."

The BSRA was founded in 1959 by transit enthusiasts who rescued an abandoned streetcar (Type 5 #5706). They meet on Saturday nights, 50 or more of them, to talk about subways and look at slides of old streetcars. They're almost all men. They discuss the technical aspects of streetcar performance. They clamor for the latest MBTA news. They gossip about when the new Green Line cars might appear.

"There are other clubs that do freight railroads and Amtrak. We try not to go in that direction," Bahne says. "It can be streetcars, it can be subway trains, it can be elevated, it can be local, it can be some other city in the US, it occasionally can be some foreign city."

The Boston Street Railway Association will hold its next meeting this Saturday, June 3. The business meeting begins at 7:30 p.m., and the entertainment program begins around 8:30 p.m. The meeting is free and open to the public. It will be held at the Grand Lodge of Masons, 186 Tremont Street, Boston, in the Paul Revere Room. For more information, call (781) 433-7015 or visit the BSRA Web site.